Sunday 9 December 2012 14.00 EST
First published on Sunday 9 December 2012 14.00 EST

British journalists have a bit of a habit of sneering at our American counterparts. Between the seemingly endless news stories, the Habit Of Capitalising Everything, and especially the headlines – "Letter Raises Questions About When BBC Ex-Chief Learned of Abuse Cases" a recent standout – lots of American journalism, on the face of it, can seem a bit quaint.

With the onslaught of the digital era continuing apace, that quaintness starts to look dangerous: in an age of short attention spans, SEO headlines and upstart online-only rivals, the US's major papers look like dinosaurs.

Spending four months in a US newsroom (specifically, that of the Washington Post, on the Laurence Stern fellowship) disabuses some of that complacency – but also underscores the impression of a US media stretching itself in two opposing directions online.

Writing about national politics, or security, in Washington DC is a strange affair without parallel in the British press. As DC is a company town, a huge proportion of the Post's 460,000-strong circulation lands in the lap of those directly involved in the process, whether as Congressmen, Capitol Hill staffers, lobbyists or members of thinktanks.

For this audience, the Post's core paying customers, nuance, detail and thoroughness are essential – and the long word-counts and laborious editorial processes stop seeming like anachronisms and start seeming like a savvy move.

When your work will be read by the 500 people who know exactly what they're talking about, every detail needs nailing down – and so a long editing process, where up to four editors may suggest changes, all of which are run past the reporter, contributes a great deal. Without it, even a strong reporting team (and the Post has some of the best) is going to drop the ball far more often.

The disconnect between this influential and affluent print audience, and the Post's wider online readership of 17.2 million unique users a month (for comparison, the Guardian has a print circulation of around 200,000 and 71.7 million monthly uniques) is therefore quite stark, an issue not faced to anything like the same extent by British papers.

It's easy only to look at the journalism produced predominantly for print and assume, therefore, that US papers such as the Washington Post aren't adapting to online. But this would be an error – in some ways, they're considerably ahead of their UK counterparts.

One example is the Post's Wonkblog. Led by 28-year-old Ezra Klein, the blog is (as the title suggests) a wonkish look at public policy, relying heavily on stats and charts.

But it's also astonishingly catchy, and well-read. Part of its popularity derives from deliberately attention-grabbing formats: explaining an issue "in one chart" or "Seven things you need to know about" features are common.

The grabby nature of this content is aided by a strong social media presence: any "seven things" features will be tweeted out, one bullet-point at a time over the course of a day, spreading to different audiences interested in different factoids.

Nothing about the process is revolutionary, but it's well executed, and well resourced: despite being most associated with Klein, the blog has six contributors, and for several of them, the blog is the main focus of their work. Another blog, The Fix, is in the name of Chris Cillizza, but similarly has two other reporters for whom it's a primary task.

A final innovation of the blogs is that they blur a previously sacrosanct line in US journalism: they are primarily analytical, but Klein in particular is a partisan – appearing as a contributor and occasional host on the decidedly liberal cable news channel MSNBC.

Marcus Brauchli, editor of the Post until the end of the year, described investment in its blogs and other online content as essential, and also as a useful way of getting new talent into the paper: a year or two staffing one of the existing blogs serves as a good first job and rite of passage before graduating to a blog of your own, or a straight reporting role at the paper.

Indeed, disagreements over the level of investment in online (and editorial in general) between Brauchli and Katherine Weymouth, the paper's publisher, were cited as a factor in Brauchli's departure from the paper – and were alluded to in the Post's own coverage.

The Post had been one of the last major US papers to hold out against introducing charging – but perhaps the different digital economics of America made it inevitable. Most US papers are based in just one city, and have a locally-concentrated print readership, made up largely of subscribers.

This puts vastly different demands on a newsroom. The comparable challenge for UK national newspapers, moving from an audience spread across one nation to an international one, is substantially simpler.

Even if the online endgame for most US papers leaves them with an audience closely resembling their print readership, it needn't spell the endgame for digital innovation.

The party conventions and election night coverage of the Post could be viewed through a "grid", which pulled in reporting, blogs, tweets, instagram and live video into a dashboard – a step ahead of many similar efforts.

Essentially, the US and UK are parting ways: in America, the paywall dominates, and the focus for most papers seems to be returning to their traditional metro audiences – with a helping hand from outside funders.

Most UK papers, meanwhile, are still pushing for large audiences in the UK and abroad, resisting paywalls, and trying to build up sustainable funding.

It's like the 20th century in reverse: the US is retrenching, the Brits are expanding. Whether boldness or caution is the right move, though, remains anyone's guess.

• This article was amended on 10 December 2012. The original said the Guardian has a print readership of around 200,000. This has been corrected to say a print circulation of around 200,000.